Two appendices are attached that contain 1) a description of each training module (and each game within each training module) in the training tool in accordance with the invention (Appendix A); and 2) a level listing from each game with each training module. These two appendices are attached to the application and are incorporated herein by reference.
This invention relates generally to a system and method for assessing and training a user to improve the user""s reading and spelling skills and in particular to a system and method for training a user""s phonological awareness and processing, auditory processing, morphological awareness, print awareness, visual orthographic memory (VOM), phonics, decoding and spelling skills in order to improve the user""s reading and spelling skills.
Skilled reading involves a complex system of skills and processes and is dependent upon an amalgam of word appearances, meanings and pronunciations. The knowledge and activities required to become a skilled reader can be developed systematically and have been studied heavily by researchers. Recently, particular attention has been focused on the importance of children""s ability to learn the alphabetic principle (recognizing that sounds in spoken words can be represented by a letter or letter). Leading researchers have shown that coupling phonological awareness training with letter-sound correspondence training increases children""s ability to develop sophisticated decoding and spelling skillsxe2x80x94particularly for those children who have difficulty learning developmental literacy skills.
Beginning readers need to develop a strong foundation of phonological awareness, letter knowledge and vocabulary. Word recognition and spelling are facilitated by a network of connections that link the phonological, orthographic, morphological and semantic characteristics of words (Ehri, 1992). Phonological connections are defined by children""s ability to notice, think about or manipulate the sounds in language (Torgesen, 1997) and are essential to establishing complete representations of words in memory. Orthographic connections are defined by children""s awareness of functional letter units symbolizing phonemes (including their shapes, names and sounds) as well as letter sequences that distinguish various word spellings from one another (Perfetti, 1992). Orthographic and phonological connections work together to benefit decoding, spelling and automatic word recognition when children first begin to read. As children progress through school and encounter longer, more complex words, they will need additional knowledge about syllable patterns and meaning-based spelling patterns (Henderson, 1991). The relative lack of phonetic substance of grammatical morphemes such as xe2x80x9cedxe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9cingxe2x80x9d xe2x80x9csxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cesxe2x80x9d makes them less prominent than content words, therefore, they are acquired later and are more problematic for some children (McGregor, 1997). Here, semantic and morphological connections become more important as children""s awareness of spelling patterns involves how spellings relate to meaningful units. This knowledge is essential for children to move beyond using only letter-sound correspondences to process printed language and into making meaningful connections to read and spell irregular and/or more complex words.
Beginning readers need to develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle. Instruction that addresses the needs of beginning readers must systematically bridge spoken language with conventions of printed language. Different types of connections between letters and sounds dominate children""s decoding and spelling at different points in development (Ehri, 1998; Treiman, 1992). Initially, Children also rely heavily on letter names which mark their attempts at representing pronunciations of words with printed letters that they know (Moats, 1995; Templeton and Bear, 1992). As children learn letter sounds, they begin to develop more robust knowledge of the alphabetic system and start to link the most salient letters in print to sounds in pronunciations. Because initial and final letters are the most salient to children, they are typically the first connections to be recognized and represented in spellings (Ehri, 1998). When children establish sufficient connections between letters and sounds, they begin to develop accumulations of words in memory and recognize recurring spelling patterns. Once this awareness is developed, children can discover that consolidating individual letter-sound correspondences into multi-letter chunks can facilitate automatic recognition and can be used to decode unknown words with the same spelling pattern (Gaskins, 1998). However, because spelling and decoding require explicit recall and recognition of orthographic sequences, particularly for words that have unique or irregular spelling patterns, children must further develop their knowledge of the internal characteristics of words, such as individual letter-sound correspondences, particularly for the medial vowel (Moats, 1995). Instruction that reinforces patterns as well as alphabetic connections linking all of the spellings in printed words to pronunciations in spoken words will help children develop mature representations of thousands of words in memory that can be used to automatically and accurately access words or parts of words for decoding and spelling.
Beginning readers need to develop word reading automatically. One way to read words is to decode individual letter-sound correspondences. Most readers use this skill to read words they do not know. However, attacking letter-sound correspondences, although essential for learning to read and for reading unfamiliar words, is often slow and sometimes not useful when encountering words with irregular and variable spelling-pronunciation relationships (e.g., read/read) (Ehri, 1992). Most experienced readers have learned to process chunks of letters in recurring spelling patterns to decode words. They also have stored words from previous experiences reading words that cannot be decoded by attacking letter-sound correspondences. Research shows that first-grade children need a minimum of four experiences with words to read them automatically (Reitsma, 1983); thus, learning to establish sight word reading skills takes time and repeated exposures to print. Research also shows that being able to read words quickly and accurately facilitates reading fluency and increases the probability that children are understanding what they are reading (Perfetti, 1992). Many students with reading problems have poor automatic word recognition skills that affect their ability to comprehend what they read (Stanovich, 1986). Instruction that is focused on children""s ability to decode unfamiliar words and is designed to develop more advanced, automatic word recognition skills will help children establish basic skills that must be in place to develop automatic word recognition and ultimately better reading fluency. By increasing automatic word recognition, children will have more cognitive resources to use for understanding text and drawing information and inferences from what is read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).
Beginning readers need to be taught to recognize patterns in how words are spelled and pronounced. Early phonological knowledge is often characterized by awareness of gross phonological units such as whole words or syllables. At the very earliest stages of literacy acquisition, young children demonstrate the ability to recognize and categorize words that rhyme (Goswami and Bryant, 1990), but continue to struggle with awareness of phonemes until they are taught to read or receive explicit phonemic awareness instruction. As reading and spelling skills become more refined, however, children develop a more detailed understanding of the underlying sound structure of spoken words and become aware of individual phonemes in speech as well as how they relate to printed words. Many researchers argue the rhyme awareness serves as the precursor to phoneme awareness. Rhyming skills are thought to play an important role in helping children transition to awareness of correspondences between letters and phonemes in words (Goswami, 1993; Treiman, 1993). This developmental progression suggests that when children begin to read and spell, they analyze words using larger phonological units and eventually become more aware of the constituent features in words that share rhyming spelling patterns. Rhyming words provide children with cues that help them make predictions about pronunciations of words that share common spelling patterns (Goswami, 1991). These hypotheses are based on findings that show that children can read and spell words that rhyme and share spelling patterns more easily than words that share medial vowels or final consonants (Bruck and Treiman, 1992; Goswami and Mead, 1992). Using spelling and pronunciation patterns to teach children about the relationship between print and speech establishes a bridge between gross phonological skills and more discreet awareness of connections between individual phonemes and letters that make up regular words in English.
Similarly, morphological awareness (i.e., the conscious awareness of and ability to manipulate compound words, root words and their inflected and derived forms) facilitates a child""s ability to read and spell words. For words that do not have a one-to-one mapping between sound (phoneme or morpheme) and spelling, visual orthographic memory (VOM) skills are critical. VOM skills are dependent on the ability to store mental images of printed letters and sequences of letters including syllables and words in memory.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a phonological reading and spelling system and method that trains a user""s phonological awareness and phonics skills and bridges the user""s auditory processing, phonological awareness and morphological awareness skills to the user""s print awareness, phonics, decoding and spelling skills and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.
The system and method in accordance with the invention uses the language-to-literacy model of learning to read to design educationally sound products for beginning readers of all skill levels. The skills represented in each step of the model are foundational to the next, while at the same time reciprocal and overlapping. The system in accordance with the invention, referred to as xe2x80x9cLetter Connectionsxe2x80x9d herein, is designed to help children who have established the sound foundations of auditory processing, oral language and phonological awareness that they will need to make connections between spoken and printed language. Letter Connections focuses on target skills in the next two steps in the modelxe2x80x94phonics and decoding/spelling. Phonics instruction helps children develop the skills they need to make linkages between discrete phonemes and individual letters. Learning sound-symbol correspondences through phonics instruction will help children establish the representations of words in memory they will need to fluently and accurately spell and decode words (Uhry and Sheperd, 1997). Teachers should initiate instruction in phonological awareness before beginning instruction in sound-symbol correspondences; however, once children have established the rudimentary phonological skills that they will need to analyze spoken words, concurrent instruction in sound-symbol correspondence will accelerate the development of more advanced phonological skills (Grossen, 1997).
Letter Connections was designed to develop and systematically bridge phonological and visual orthographic memory skills with phonics, reading and spelling instruction. The program offers a variety of engaging activities that incorporate cutting-edge research methods and clinically-proven training techniques to children who are beginning to make the leap into early decoding and spelling. The instructional approach used in Letter Connections emphasizes the importance of teaching word spellings, meanings and pronunciations together. This approach was designed to develop children""s awareness of how printed letters represent spoken words and sounds. Skill training in sound-symbol correspondence, phonics, reading fluency, sight word recognition, morphological awareness and print awareness provide children with exposure to the knowledge and activities they will need to successfully decode words.
Letter Connections games provide extensive systematic instruction designed to help children map printed letters to sounds in spoken language and develop key skills they will need to acquire basic reading and spelling skills. The extensive decoding and spelling activities incorporate skill training in letter-sound identification, fluency and vocabulary development using an adaptive training format. Letter Connections carefully controls important learning variables such as time between stimuli presentations, response time, varying spelling pattern difficulty (e.g., CVC, CCVC, CVCC) as well as the availability of visual cues. Letter Connections also incorporates brief tutorials designed to reinforce meaning and help children learn new vocabulary. These skills are taught in tandem to help children move from understanding in spoken language to understanding how the sound structure in spoken language applies to print.
Letter Connections develops children""s knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences by leading children through a series of tasks designed to develop awareness of letter-sound correspondences in different contexts such as asking students to decode, blend and identify onsets and rime units, individual letters and eventually whole words. By presenting children with different linguistic units, Letter Connections helps children analyze and synthesize important components of words while building upon what they know about spoken language and what they are learning about print. The systematic progression through which children are taken when playing Letter Connections games is based upon years of developmental spelling research. Letter Connections provides practice that takes children from segmenting sentences into words to blending individual letters and sounds to make a whole word. Letter Connections gradually fades auditory support and visual cues to develop children""s ability to match spoken sounds and words to printed letters, words and sentences. In addition, Letter Connections provides opportunities for children to exercise these skills by using nonwords. Nonwords challenge children""s decoding and spelling skill by encouraging them to transfer what they know about familiar words to read and spell unfamiliar letter strings.
Letter Connections carefully teaches children to develop automatic letter and word recognition skills. Letter Connections systematically decreases the amount of response time available to students, gradually encouraging children to recognize and identify words more quickly and accurately. Letter Connections also fades visual cues and auditory feedback to help children develop automatic word recognition and use visual orthographic images. All games require children to apply letter-sound correspondences and pattern recognition skills in the context of words, providing multiple exposures to a variety of common spelling patterns, decodable real words and non-decodable sight words.
Letter Connections uses regular, frequently occurring English spelling patterns to teach children to recognize common rime units among words. The games do not stop at the onset-rime level They progressively present information designed to develop children""s awareness of the internal characteristics of common spelling patterns, thereby bridging the gap between whole word recognition and decoding with individual letter-sound correspondences. Letter Connections incorporates sorting tasks that encourage development of children""s knowledge of regularity in larger linguistic units (rimes), but gradually increase difficulty by focusing children on medial vowels or final consonants with visual cues and more complex sorting requirements This training takes children beyond the regularity of regular rime units and encourages them to examine the constituent linguistic units that differentiate one rime pattern from the next. Letter Connections reduces reaction time and gradually fades visual cues to increase word reading fluency and use of visual orthographic images.
The phonological reading and spelling system and method in accordance with the invention may train and diagnose problems with a user""s auditory processing, phonological awareness and processing skills that are important to the development of reading and spelling skills of the user. In addition, the system in accordance with the invention also introduces morphological awareness and visual orthographic memory training and diagnosis. In more detail, the training provided by the system bridges a user""s auditory processing skills, phonological awareness skills, morphological awareness skills and visual orthographic memory skills with print awareness and phonics, decoding and spelling instruction. Thus, as suggested by various research studies, the training provided by the system begins with phonological awareness skills and then transitions automatically to the concurrent teaching and training of phonological awareness skills with sound-symbol correspondences (phonics). The training provided by the system in accordance with the invention also permits a user, such as a child, to apply his/her morphological awareness and knowledge of phonics to decoding printed words. The training provided by the system in accordance with the invention also provides spelling instruction to the user which has a positive effect on the user""s phonological awareness and decoding skills.
The training provided by the system in accordance with the invention may be from one or more different modules which train one or more particular sets of phonological awareness and processing, auditory processing, morphological awareness and visual orthographic memory (VOM) skills of the user. Each module may include one or more tasks wherein each task may train a particular skill or set of skills of the user. In a preferred embodiment, the system may include four different modules including a sentence/syllable/sound segmentation and discrimination module (called xe2x80x9cRock Onxe2x80x9d in the preferred embodiment), a segmentation/blending and decoding/spelling module (called xe2x80x9cSlurp and Burp in the preferred embodiment), a sound/symbol module (called xe2x80x9cLetter Expressxe2x80x9d in the preferred embodiment) and a sound and word recognition module (called xe2x80x9cJuggling Lettersxe2x80x9d in the preferred embodiment). Each task within a module may be a game with an interactive graphical user interface that requires user input. Each game may also include a scoring mechanism to track the user""s progress. The system may store the scores for each user so that the scores for a particular user may be analyzed later. In addition to training the user""s skills, the system may be used to diagnose defects in one or more skill areas of the user, making performance comparisons within and across tasks to help determine areas of strength, weakness and variables that influence both.
Thus, in accordance with the invention, a device and method for training one or more reading and spelling skills of a user including phonological and morphological skills is provided. The device has a graphical display that displays images to a user and a user input device that permits the user to interact with the computer. The device may further include a game that presents stimuli to the user so that the user can respond to the stimuli and improve the reading and spelling skills of the user wherein the game further comprises a phonological skills training portion for training the phonological skills of the user and a sound/symbol correspondence training portion for training the sound/symbol correspondence skills of the user wherein the game trains the phonological skills of the user and then transitions to training the sound/symbol correspondence skills once the phonological skills are mastered (Holy! That sentence is tinged with Faulknerism).
In accordance with another aspect of the invention, a method and computer-implemented system for training a user""s spelling and reading skills is provided. The system visually presents a target word to the user for a predetermined time and then visually presents a series of words to the user after the target word is removed. The system then prompts the user to identify the word in the series of words whose letters are in reverse order to the target word.
In accordance with yet another aspect of the invention, a method and computer-implemented system for training a user""s spelling and reading skills is provided. The system visually presents one or more words to the user and visually presents one or more categories into which the word is sorted by the user. The system then prompts the user to sort the one or more words into the one or more categories to improve the user""s skills at recognizing patterns in words.